Mid-January Reading List – The CoinFund Blog

James synthesizes the Ethereum 2.0 roadmap from the point of view of the developer. Ethereum 2.0’s initiatives, which include Proof of Stake using a Beacon Chain, sharding, state rents, and an eWASM VM, will subvert many assumptions, implications, and tooling of writing code on top of Ethereum. James takes us through the likely changes and speculates on how inter-shard communication might work.

Whither the Price of Bitcoin?by David Andolfatto and Andrew Spewak

In this short article from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, economists posit that the price of Bitcoin will be somewhere between $0 and a high number — and they’re right. Perhaps best aimed at bank CEO-type cryptocurrency detractors in language they can understand, the summary is that “economic theory predicts that the price dynamic of an unbacked asset is likely to be highly volatile and inherently unforecastable.”

The Moloch DAO: Collapsing The Firm by Simon de la Rouviere

Will Moloch DAO, a new DAO design spearheaded by Ameen Soleimani, be a better model for coordinating developer grants for Ethereum? Simon takes us through the features — and concerns — of Moloch’s design, from the idea of incentivizing defection (and thus creating risks of “collapse”) to feeding the DAO with any manner of ERC-20, a completely novel feature of any DAO yet described.

2018 roundup and Q4 updates by Roberto Vis

Some companies from the 2017 ICO boom chose to have been quietly building while other focused on price action. Lithuania’s Mysterium Network, a decentralized VPN product, falls squarely in the former category. In this end of the year update, Robert highlights some launch successes and modest adoption metrics for the early prototype.

The Urbit primer by urbit

If you’ve never heard of Urbit, you should catch up by reading the 17-year-old project’s pristinely-written primer, which launched along with the network’s Ethereum address management facility, Azimuth, on Ethereum this week. The self-described “personal server built from scratch” might be one of the most streamlined and intentional product launches in the entire decentralization space, and the concept of the Urbit network is a fascinating rabbit hole.